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What counts as “natural” anyway?

For several weeks now I have been trying to write about the Nuffield Bioethics Report called (un)Natural. The Nuffield Bioethics Council is a non-partisan bioethics think tank that analyzes particular issues of importance in science, medicine, and technology. They are based in the UK and have some influence over policy issues because of their presence in the mainstream media.

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I have had a hard time analyzing this report because, while it uses careful language and tries very hard to be respectful of people’s views, it has a sense of an agenda about it. I found Michael Cook’s description at BioEdge helpful:

While the report is cautiously phrased, it prepares the ground for an official government stand that the word ‘natural’ is so ambiguous and confusing that it is meaningless and should therefore be ridiculed and discarded. It’s hard to imagine what cannot be approved in the new bio-technologies if this happens.

The report seems to come across as an analytical approach to a study of how words are used, but this may be a case of hiding agendas behind the objective veneer of linguistic deconstruction. More.

Reality check: Bioethics today mainly exists in order to justify the unjustifiable. To explain, for example, how it can be compassionate and healing to kill and maim. Our society is far less likely to sanction horrendous behaviour without bioethics than with it. Most killers and maimers are not casusts; they cannot fake ethics and integrity nearly as well as a trained professional can. The people who promote bioethics now would drop it like a hot fork if it did not come up with the needed justifications.

See also: Belgian Catholic bishops take meaningful stand against euthanasia. They actually did something. Wouldn’t likely happen in Canada. We don;t just have legacy mdia; we have legacy bishops too.

Belgian MP also calls for euthanasia law review pending child euthanasia (Again, conveniently, they probably can’t stop now because that would make the Cool people who did it before out to be murderers, which would be a trigger warning/microaggression against their dignity)

It continues: Quebec, maybe Canada, to falsify euthanasia death certificates The right to falsify a death certificate when someone is killed will doubtless prove very convenient in days to come. (Note how few people we meet here care or notice.)